Hegar

I heard that some abbot wrote that you should choose the dullest, least intelligent monks to be scribes since it’s just copying other’s work over and over again. I’m not surprised some of them got a little bored.

Thank you, you sweet voice of sanity!

Yep! It’s bonkers stuff. And it almost certainly represents a widespread cultural practice, since they felt the need to regulate how and when you could do it.

It really highlights for me not just how irrelevant and detrimental the bible is to our world, but how disruptive teenage hormones can be to a society. Thousands of years later and exclusion, abuse and killing are still the tools that the troubled teen industry uses.

Giving birth to someone does not give you the right to murder them.

Obviously not.

It just highlights how much of a problem teenagers can be that the only solution canaanites could find was “I guess sometimes killing them is ok?” It’s not. Throwing teenagers into the wilderness to pillage and rape is also quite obviously not on, nor is abusing them in a blizzard in Utah.

My point is that for thousands of years, we’ve been failing to find a reasonable way to deal with the problem of teenagers.

This is obviously brutish and inhumane, but it also highlights a real problem that we don’t have a great solution for: what the fuck do you do about teenagers? They’re often just unbearably awful. I know I was.

In the bible you get permission to declare your teenager wayward, take them outside the city gates and stone them to death.

Many Indo-European groups sent them off into the wilderness to harass and steal from distant or enemy towns, or to act as defensive scouts around your territory.

These teenagers sound like their behavior was pretty tame, but hormones are a hell of thing. Teenaged care facilities that aren’t just jail or a cult should probably exist.

Every time someone tries to convince me that apples aren’t just garbage fruit they ask, “but have you tried honey crisps?” Yeah, have you tried any other fruit? The worst fruit from the tropics is just way better than the best apple.

We were getting a single order of fries from McD’s in Missoula Montana and the only employee worth a damn looked around 10.

He kept telling his mother that the fries were ready and he could just give them to us, but she insisted that orders must go out in the same order they came in. So we waited another 10 minutes.

When he was finally permitted to give us our fries, he had this incredibly mature, put-upon expression as he said “I’m so sorry for the wait.”

At my previous job their was a role where you just called insurance companies and asked them incredibly basic questions about what they planned to do for a patient with diagnosis X and plan Y. This information should be searchable in a document with a single correct answer, but insurance companies are too scummy for that to be reliable.

In 2021 we started using a robot that sounded like a human to call instead. It could handle the ~80%+ of calls that don’t use any critical thinking. At a guess, that’s maybe 5-10% of our division’s workforce that wasn’t needed anymore.

With the amount of jobs like this that are 100% bullshit, I’m sure there are plenty of other cases where businesses can save money by buying an automated bullshit generator, instead of hiring a breathing bullshit generator.

the world is lead by assholes, on all sides.

This is an objectively true statement. Of course the world is lead by assholes.

We all know that power corrupts. Neuroscience has shown that getting power damages the brain’s capacity for empathy.

You just can’t lead a nation without becoming capable of great evil.

Yep, for sure. She was making a very specific point at the time, about not letting cars behind you pressure you into going faster than you feel comfortable.

When I was learning to drive at the age of 30, the first time I went on the highway, my friend teaching me flipped the rear view mirror up and sternly declared, “Never look back.”

You can say that people who identify as introverts use more concrete language, but there’s no reliable way to identify intro/extraversion because it’s about as scientific as an internet personality quiz.

Jung’s original definition that some people get energy from socializing while others have to expend energy to socialize doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. We’re social primates and sometimes we like socializing and other times we find it taxing but often it’s a little of both.

If you really don’t like socializing you may have some degree of social anxiety, and maybe you identify as an introvert. Which is fine of course - most people will understand what you mean.

But I think it’s important to remember that we’re not talking about a real thing that actually exists in our genes or brains. It’s just a vague description of your attitude to socializing.

Nazis in the 1940s were actually socialists

No, they were not. Not at all, not even a little.

You can’t eat urinal cake and great danes don’t get a vote in the national elections in Denmark.

Sometimes a name is misleading.

Don’t Do What Donny Don’t Does!

This is objectively within the bounds of “normal” human experience. It’s seen in primates and other mammals too.

Sleeping in the same bed as your family was the norm for a long while, across many cultures. It was also perfectly normal for say a noble to sleep in the same bed as some of their staff, or for merchants or other traveller to share a bed while on the road.

Most people in many western cultures would probably find it weird, but they’re the weird ones for needlessly sexualizing the act of sleeping.

how can I have good long time memory while having zero short memory

Sometimes when people have short-term or working memory issues, the brain over-relies on long-term memory to compensate.

A vast patchwork of incredibly different lifeways that you can flee to whenever then taxman and his goons come round.

nothing gets out of your brain on its own, except heat.

I heard a recording of a song made by reading a brain that was thinking that song. It was far from perfect, but you could tell which song it was. I’m no neuroscientist, but if that information can already be plucked from a brain, surely that’s proof that reconstructing thoughts is possible to some degree?

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neuroscientist-pink-floyd-music-brain-activity

If it’s a nation state, it’s already not a democracy.

The idea that choosing which particular rich people sit in a fancy building is somehow democracy is quite funny.

Whenever I’m depressed about the Republicans and their fascist destruction of our country, I like to think back to that pitiful plea of jeb exclamation point. It still makes me smile.